Finally making the switch from Outlook Express to full blown CRM

Hong Kong importer-exporter makes one of the largest relationship management leaps we’ve ever seen. From one of the most rudimentary contact management software applications to a full blown CRM system.

Business:

Raja Selarka is the owner of Comet (HK) Ltd, a 15-year-old import-export business. Comet purchases consumer and household goods from China and exports them worldwide.

The Challenge:

For 14 years Selarka managed his business through Outlook Express, the free email/contact manager application that comes pre-installed with every copy of the Windows operating system. He wasn’t using any CRM software. He hadn’t ever been exposed to it.

Outside of his own memory and a few scribbled notes, Selarka had nothing to remind him to call and email clients, vendors, and suppliers. When he travelled, he had no resource to look back at his history of communications. All that information was back at his office on his computer.

How discovered Zoho CRM:

Selarka never looked for another solution beyond Outlook Express because he simply never came across any type of CRM solution. It appears he didn’t even know about the category of CRM. That was until he saw Zoho at a friend’s office and realized, this is exactly what I want.

Competitive analysis of CRM:

Zoho CRM wasn’t the first CRM solution Selarka saw. He saw others. Was impressed. But the costs were so ludicrously high that he didn’t even bother. It’s understandable that Selarka balked when he first started looking at CRM solutions. For 14 years he had been using a free application to manage business relations.

Zoho CRM’s price didn’t send a shock to Selarka’s bank account. It was at a price he wanted, and he started using it just one year ago.

Unique use case of Zoho CRM:

Selarka is a very traditional CRM user. He takes advantage of Zoho CRM’s reminder features, which was his greatest need after leaving Outlook Express.

Given that an import-export business involves endless transactions with numerous suppliers, Selarka loved having contact information and invoicing all in one window, not scattered across multiple applications. In addition, all of Comet’s pricing information is within Zoho. So if he’s out and about and a customer asks about the price of a product, he can just look it up online. He doesn’t need to go back to the office.

Advice for others:

Selarka has become a complete convert to Zoho.

“If you have Zoho, you don’t need anything else,” he said.

We appreciate the compliment, but with all the other great tools out there (many of which Zoho integrates with) we can’t take full credit for answering all business problems. But if we’d previously been running our business on Outlook Express we’d agree as well about Zoho. Thanks Raja.